Can God Be Grieved?

Kevin Harris: John Piper started an interesting topic at a recent panel discussion, Bill. The panel was held at the 2026 Serious Joy Pastor's Conference in Minneapolis. It was hosted by Bethlehem College and Theological Seminary. We're going to look at some of the segments of the video and get your response. Let's go ahead and go to the first clip here. Here's what Piper asked theologian Kevin DeYoung. Clip number one.

John Piper: Complete the sentence: Quenching the Holy Spirit, grieving the Holy Spirit means ___. And I want to know what it means for the Spirit. Okay? Not for me. That's easy. I'd like to hear Mr. Aseity and Impassibility explain to me how the Spirit can be grieved because that's . . . and I've got . . . it's not an easy question, and I like those words. I get it. But we're talking about God. That's God. You're going to grieve God? What in the world does that mean?

Kevin Harris: Well, he's referring to Paul's statements in Ephesians 4:30 and 1 Thessalonians 5:19, for example. “Do not grieve or quench the Spirit.” But first, he good-naturedly called DeYoung “Mr. Aseity and Mr. Impassibility.” Let's take one thing at a time. Do a little refresher here. Refresh God's attribute of aseity, Bill. Then we'll get to impassibility a little later in the podcast.

Dr. Craig: All right. God's aseity comes from the Latin a se, which means “by itself,” and what it connotes is God's self-existence. That is to say, God does not depend upon anything else for his existence. He is the sole ultimate reality who depends upon nothing and all other reality depends upon God for its existence and is therefore contingent.

Kevin Harris: I think you can see what's coming, Bill, just from this first clip. The issue may be to what extent the Scriptures use anthropomorphic language. That is, giving God human characteristics that he may not actually have at least in the way a finite limited human like us would have them. That's a sneak preview that's coming up. But before Kevin DeYoung answers, I'd like to hear your thoughts on grieving and quenching God, the Holy Spirit. Bill?

Dr. Craig: Well, it seems to me that what Paul means basically is resisting the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is attempting to draw us to God, to sanctify us, to conform us to the image of Christ. And the person who resists the Holy Spirit is said to grieve or quench the Spirit of God. And it seems to me that that is quite a literal notion. I don't see any difficulty in thinking that we have the ability to resist the Holy Spirit.

Kevin Harris: I think our listeners understand that John Piper is being facetious a little bit here. He's not mocking the Scriptures, but he's just trying to communicate the potential difficulty of the topic. He continues with the question in this next clip.

John Piper: You're going to quench God? You're to stop God from doing what God wants to do? All the language we've been using here is “we're stopping him.” He's coming with fire and we're putting it out. Who do you think you are? You can't put out the fire of God. All the purposes of God will be established. That's the question for me. It’s a much more difficult question than what do I do to do it, but rather what's it like for him?

Kevin Harris: Well, my first impression was that Piper's Calvinism is showing a little bit here. And I think that Molinism comes in strong at this point. For example, Paul talks about his plans being hindered by Satan in 1 Thessalonians 2:18. And then we have the instance of the prince of Persia intercepting God's messenger in Daniel 10, which seems on the surface that God's plans were at least interrupted. And I anticipate that you would agree with Piper that ultimately God's will prevails. But is there a Molinistic way of speculating how God might deal with obstacles as they occur in the course of his will?

Dr. Craig: I agree with you that Piper's difficulties here are self-generated. They are the result of his Calvinism which thinks of God's grace as irresistible and all-determining and we do not have libertarian freedom to resist God. And the reason that I think that that is an unbiblical view is because the New Testament says that God wants everyone to be saved. 1 Timothy 2:4 says, "God, our Savior, desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." And that desire is obviously thwarted. Not everyone is saved and comes to the knowledge of the truth. Some people are separated from God forever. That desire of God is obviously thwarted. On Molinism, God works with the free agents' decisions in order to bring about his will. But ultimately God does not impose his will unilaterally upon human agents. He has to work with them to bring about his desires, and in some cases his absolute intentions like universal salvation are thwarted by human beings.

Kevin Harris: He is asking Kevin DeYoung to give an answer to this, and he does answer. Let's see if you agree with what he says. Here's the next clip.

Kevin DeYoung: Yeah, I have a good answer that John won't like because impassibility is really important.

John Piper: Tell me what that means in a sense.

Kevin DeYoung: God is never rendered passive and in particular that God as God does not suffer and that God does not experience emotion as we experience emotion. We know that we do not want to reduce the Bible and be afraid of the Bible's affective language relative to God. It's all over the place. We have to understand how do we interpret that language. And I'll get to the Bible because I know John wants the Bible. Westminster Confession does have a helpful phrase that God does not consist of parts or passions. The language of he doesn't have parts is the attribute of his simplicity. God is not a composition of many parts. That is he is not . . . you get justice and mercy and love and you get all of these attributes and you duct tape them together and there's God because then it would be you take one of those and you no longer have God. God is everything that he has. Every attribute he has he has to the fullest.

Kevin Harris: Well, we better stop right there and discuss divine simplicity before we get to what is meant by passions and impassibility. Your view on divine simplicity is prominent in your writings and in these podcasts.

Dr. Craig: Well, I'm afraid that Kevin DeYoung gives a very poor explanation of this alleged attribute. You see, everybody agrees that God is not a composition made up of parts. Moreover, everybody agrees that God has his attributes to the maximal degree possible. That's not sufficient for a robust doctrine of divine simplicity. Moreover, it's uncontroversial that God cannot lose any of his essential attributes. Really, what DeYoung has said fails to express what the doctrine of divine simplicity states in its strongest form. I think he comes closer when he says that God is his properties. But notice that the real issue then here is not composition but whether there is complexity in God. Whether God is a complex being who is not only, for example, omnipotent but also omniscient and morally perfect and eternal and omnipresent and so forth, which seem to be clearly distinct and different properties. That's not composition, that's complexity.

Kevin Harris: When we first hear that God has no passions, our reaction might be well of course he does. But we need to explore that. Here's what DeYoung says it means. Next clip.

Kevin DeYoung: You cannot rank the attributes as some being essential, some being relative. He doesn't have parts and he doesn't have passions. Not passion in a passion for the supremacy of God. We use that word in a different way. In a 17th-century long tradition in Western theology and philosophy understands passions to be that which is passive. Passions come over you. Affections are different. There's a reason that Jonathan Edwards' famous book is Religious Affections, not even religious emotions. Some would argue the word “emotion” as an English word didn't exist until later in the 18th or the beginning of the 19th century because an affection is a motion of the will. It's different than Edwards saying you must have these emotions – related but different. God does not have passions meaning things do not just happen to God. All of that is some theological ballast.

Kevin Harris: Passions and affections. Bill, sort that out for us. Let's hear your thoughts.

Dr. Craig: To say that God has passions simply means that God can be affected by us and the things that we do. To say that he has passions is not to say that he's passive in the sense of being inactive, but it just means that he is able to be affected by what we do. And the classic doctrine of divine simplicity and impassibility denies that God has passions in that sense. He is utterly unaffected by anything that we do, which is I think a deeply unbiblical idea. The classic doctrine of divine simplicity and impassibility, in order to defend God's not having passions, has to state that God does not stand in any real relations with anything else. He does not really love us or know us or will certain things. Rather, the only relation that is real is on the other side. We are loved. We are known. We are willed. But on God's side, he does not love us. He does not know us. He does not will us because God is utterly unrelated to things outside himself lest you introduce passions into God. Now, DeYoung's definition of affections is, I think, very strange. He says it's just a motion of the will. That makes God like a machine, I think, and not like a person who is genuinely moved by compassion or anger or joy.

Kevin Harris: Let's continue that and get into anthropomorphisms some more in this next clip. Here again is Kevin DeYoung.

Kevin DeYoung: The answer which I think, and John maybe finds slightly unsatisfying, is that I think there are just as there are anthropomorphisms in Scripture which we understand instinctively. God's right arm, God's fiery eyes, burnished bronze. We understand these depictions of God and his majesty. We don't think he actually has hair white as wool. Nothing wrong with that. And eyes of fire. We understand these are anthropomorphisms. They are describing God in ways that humans can understand with human body. So anthropopathisms are describing God with human emotions in ways that we can understand, a condescension and accommodation of his language, analogous language.

Kevin Harris: Big topic here. To what extent does God have these human-like characteristics and to what extent is it mere analogy? It seems to me that, like you said earlier, God could have some kind of emotional component. We see in the Bible his anger, his patience, his love, his zealousness and so on. He desires to gather Jerusalem in his wings. But if you would go ahead and comment on that clip.

Dr. Craig: I agree with you. I see no reason at all to think that every ascription of emotions to God is a case of anthropopathisms. Why would DeYoung adopt a view like that? It's certainly not a biblical view. DeYoung's God is a cold, unfeeling, unmoved being that is not at all like the God of the Bible.

Kevin Harris: We're going to continue with DeYoung's answer. And again, I want to get your evaluation on what he says, Bill. Here's the next clip.

Kevin DeYoung: I would say grieving the Holy Spirit. Obviously, biblical language. I used it yesterday. We should not be afraid to use it. But we should help our people lest we think that we are ultimately preventing God from doing what God in his decree has not decreed to do.

Dr. Craig: I think that what he's talking about, frankly, is the Calvinistic doctrine that everything is unilaterally predestined by God and that therefore we cannot prevent God's will from being done. God unilaterally determines everything that happens. And I think that this kind of unilateral divine causal determinism is really destructive of human freedom and significance.

Kevin Harris: Let's continue with DeYoung's thoughts. He goes to 1 Samuel 15 in this next clip. Here it is.

Kevin DeYoung: But the quenching and the grieving is a human way inspired by the Spirit to describe just like . . . you say, well, what's a rationale for thinking this way? 1 Samuel 15 is a great text because in there that Saul should not be made king and it says that the Lord repented. He repented of making him king. But it says at the end of that God is not a man that he should repent or change his mind. And you can't go to the Hebrew and find your deliverance and say it's a different Hebrew word. It’s the same word, same word. So we have to say that there's some way in which God repents, namely from our vantage point as we see time unfold, he did something, now he is undoing that thing. And 1 Samuel 15 tells us we must absolutely say there's a way that God cannot repent. So in the same way I would say we speak of him grieving and let's safeguard that he does not grieve as we grieve, does not experience emotion as we experience emotion. These are anthropopathisms.

Kevin Harris: Okay. Well, he completes his answer by admonishing us to strike a balance with what 1 Samuel 15 teaches. God repents for making Saul the king. But God's regret or repentance may differ from the way we humans experience that. How in the world do we work that out?

Dr. Craig: I discuss these passages in my book, The Only Wise God. And what I show is that when Scripture speaks of God's repenting, what it means is that God was pained by what had happened. And that is incompatible with divine impassibility. It means that God is affected by what we do. And these passages I think are proof positive of that. But I agree that God does not repent in the sense that he failed to foresee the future and so had regretted what he had done. He knew the future, but nevertheless he is pained by human sin and disobedience.

Kevin Harris: Two more clips to look at, and these are from Pastor Piper. Here's the first one.

John Piper: I think the most important thing about impassibility is you do never want to say that God is taken over by anything. That's the value of that doctrine in my mind. And I think that 1 Samuel 15 text is exactly the right place to go, and that we can put the word grief in there as well as repent. God is grieved. He is not grieved as a man. God is not a man that he should be grieved as Piper is grieved. That's exactly the right thing to say. Then I think it is helpful to try to say how he is grieved. And I don't find it helpful to stop with anthropomorphisms – to just put that name on it and then not leave it corresponding to some reality that it's totally ineffable. I think that's not helpful.

Kevin Harris: If I'm hearing him right, he's not convinced descriptions like God's grieving are totally anthropomorphic, but that they in fact may have some kind of reference in God's character that we need to contemplate.

Dr. Craig: Yes, that does seem to be what he's saying. But notice then what a weak understanding of impassibility he has. For him, it just means that God is not overtaken by anything. But that's perfectly consistent with God's having emotions – loving us, being hurt by our sin and intransigence, being wrathful when people are victimized. Piper is expounding a doctrine of impassibility which is so weak that it's perfectly consistent with God's having emotions and being grieved.

Kevin Harris: Here's the final clip. John Piper concludes.

John Piper: God disapproves of what Saul has become. He does not like it. He's not obedient. He knew that was going to happen. So to say that he regrets making Saul king does not mean, “It snuck up on me and I didn't know it was going to happen and I'm looking back with remorse as though I didn't know it was going to happen.” So if you can now say the disapproval was there already – and it was. So God disapproves of what he's planning. If you can handle that theologically, I think you can talk about some element of regret or grief in God that doesn't have any of the defects of human grief.

Kevin Harris: Well, Piper calls for theology that allows for God to disapprove of what he's planning. My mind is swirling with Calvinism, Molinism, and Arminianism. Bill, what's our theology to be that he's calling for?

Dr. Craig: Well, I think what Piper says here is very close to what I said a moment ago, that God has a will that takes into account what human beings will do, even if he disapproves of what they'll do. The problem is: That's not compatible with Calvinism! That's Molinism or Arminianism.^[1]